In this editorial, we first offer a glimpse of the scope and traditions of studying phonology in the Nordic countries and how these are mirrored in the aims of FiNo and the topics presented at its ...2020 workshop. We then summarize the individual contributions to the volume, showing how they connect nicely with an overarching framework, which we call ‘Autosegmental Metrical Optimality Theory’.
•Rating changes in water and energy constraint due to large-scale revegetation.•Proposing an optimality-theory based framework to delve changes in water constraint.•Increased precipitation alleviated ...increased water constraint due to revegetation.•Compared to disturbed and excessive, equilibrium state has minimum water constraint.
Vegetation has critical effects on land–atmosphere substance and energy exchange, however, it is not yet clear how large-scale revegetation alters ecosystem constraints to ecosystem function. Here, by applying correlation indices, we investigated the water and energy constraints to evapotranspiration (denoted ECW and ECR, respectively), and further explored the mechanisms and contributors from 1982 to 2015 on the Chinese Loess Plateau. The results revealed that after revegetation, reductions in the ECW on the water dominant regions (WDR) and the energy dominant regions (EDR) by 0.019 per km2 and 0.154 per km2, respectively; and that a decrease of 0.064 per km2 in the ECR on the WDR, contrasted with an increase of 0.120 per km2 on the EDR. The patterns of changes in the ECW and ECR were closely related to aridity index and changes in vegetation coverage, indicating the co-regulation of vegetation and climate changes. The increased precipitation exerted important role in alleviating the ECW by providing greater water availability for evapotranspiration, even reversing the enhanced ECW on the WDR resulted from vegetation changes and warming climate. Conversely, the ECR enhanced (alleviated) on the EDR (WDR), owing to climate changes, which depended on whether it was energy or water dominated. As inferred from Eagleson’s optimality perspectives, it was further confirmed that the equilibrium relationship between vegetation coverage and local climatic conditions has a critical role in regulating the ECW. Our results provided new insights into how the ECW enhanced by revegetation can be alleviated by increased precipitation and the equilibrium relationship, particularly on the WDR, and also offered more evidence-based and holistic strategy for sustainable development and construction of ecological programs.
Revegetation is accelerating globally due to its benefits for ecosystem restoration, desertification prevention, and climate change mitigation. The Loess Plateau has suffered serious erosion in the ...past decades, and revegetation projects, such as those under the ‘Grain for Green’ program, have been conducted for soil erosion prevention. The irrational distribution of artificial plantations had negative consequences, including vegetation degradation, soil drying, and decreases in streamflow. Determining the suitable plant species is critical in guiding the design of revegetation programs and may help delimit the suitable boundaries for artificial plantations. In this study, we used an eco-hydrological model to quantify the suitability of two typical revegetation species (Robinia pseudoacacia and Stipa bungeana) using a developed vegetation suitability equation, which estimates the water use/water stress trade-off. The results showed that R. pseudoacacia was more sensitive to water stress than S. bungeana. The water use of both species varied along the precipitation gradient, and S. bungeana generally had a higher water use than R. pseudoacacia. Suitable areas for R. pseudoacacia were mainly located in the northeastern part of the plateau. By overlaying the suitable boundaries for R. pseudoacacia on the current land cover, we found that the area of forests distributed in unsuitable regions reached 7.31% of the entire Loess Plateau. Converting forests beyond the suitable boundary to grasslands would increase the water yield (0.51%–12.23%) and slightly decrease the soil retention capacity (0.01%–0.08%), resulting in a ‘win-win’ situation for sustainable plant-soil ecosystems and soil-water conservations. Additionally, the suitable area of R. pseudoacacia is predicted to shrink under projected future drying trends. In conclusion, vegetation suitability in the future planning and design of revegetation projects should be considered to effectively tackle the impacts of environmental degradation and climate change in the Loess Plateau.
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•Ecological optimality-based model was used to assess the vegetation suitability.•Current and future suitable boundaries of two restoration species were delimited.•A ‘win-win’ land-use change plan was put forward based on suitable boundary.•The developed model can help guide the future revegetation program planning.
Collective animal behaviour is a subfield of behavioural ecology, making extensive use of its tools of observation, experimental manipulation and model building. However, a fundamental behavioural ...ecology approach, the application of optimality theory, has been comparatively neglected in collective animal behaviour. This article seeks to address this imbalance, by outlining an evolutionary theory framework for the discipline. The application of optimality theory to collective animal behaviour requires a number of questions to be addressed. First, what is the correct quantity to optimize? This can be achieved via a combination of considering the organisms' life history, alongside tools such as statistical decision theory and stochastic dynamic programming. Second, what mechanism is appropriate for optimal behaviour? This involves ensuring that models are self-consistent rather than assuming parameter values. Third, at what level of selection does optimization act? Selection acts on the individual except in very particular circumstances, yet collective animal behaviour phenomena are group level, thus introducing a risk of confusing at what level adaptive properties emerge. This article presents examples under each of the three questions, as well as discussing mismatches between theory and observation. In doing so, it is hoped that collective animal behaviour fully inherits the tools and philosophy of its parent discipline of behavioural ecology.
•We undertake a review of collective animal behaviour using Tinbergen's four questions.•We thus identify a lack of optimality theory in collective animal behaviour.•We propose three new questions for optimality theory in collective animal behaviour.•Using these questions we review the literature for successes and missed opportunities.
This paper analyzes the ethnic traditional sports culture regarding three characteristics: sport, ethnicity, and tradition. Secondly, it examines the state of development of ethnic traditional sports ...and provides a direction for their development. Then, it is to select the variables, set them, and construct the optimization model for developing ethnic traditional sports based on optimization theory. Finally, the factors that influence the development of ethnic traditional sports are analyzed through empirical evidence. The results show that 75.8% of the residents in T city area think that the three dimensions of historical elements, cultural elements and communication methods have the most influence on the development of traditional ethnic sports, and 145 residents think that social factors have the least influence on the development of ethnic traditional sports.
Reconstitution of control architecture creates a great challenge for distributed drive electric vehicles (DDEV), due to the emergence of a new distributed driving strategy. To this end, a novel ...distributed control architecture is proposed in this paper for integrated control of active front steering (AFS) system and direct yaw moment (DYC) system. First, a multi-agent system (MAS) is employed to construct a general framework, where AFS and DYC act as agents that work together to improve vehicle lateral stability and simultaneously reduce workloads of drivers during path tracking. The cooperative control strategies of two agents are obtained through Pareto-optimality theory to ensure optimal control performance of AFS and DYC. Then, on the basis of dynamic interaction between agents, terminal constraints, including terminal cost function and terminal input with local static feedback, are designed to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the close-loop system. Finally, virtual simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed controller. The results indicate that the proposed control architecture can effectively preserve vehicle stability and reduce workloads of drivers, especially for the inexperienced driver. Furthermore, the hardware-in-loop (HIL) test results also demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed controller.
Dagaare is a language of northern Ghana and adjoining areas of Burkina Faso. There are two tones, H and L, and contrastive downstep H!H that involves a non-automatic pitch drop between two H tones. ...The challenge is to explain the extensive morphological conditioning of tonal processes, including dissimilation, downstep and spreading. Our solution involves level ordering: tones are introduced at different morphological levels (stems, words and phrases) and later processes can make earlier processes opaque. Tonal differences between nouns (spreading) versus verbs (no spreading) and stems (dissimilation) versus words (downstep) arise from constraint ranking differences within and across levels. There are two kinds of downsteps: stem-level downsteps are underlying L tones affiliated with some morpheme; word-level downsteps are L tones inserted by a general process of word-final lowering. Only one downstep per word is allowed. If more would arise, the morphologically inner downstep blocks the morphologically outer downstep.
The Calibrated Error-Driven Ranking Algorithm (CEDRA;
) is shown to fail on two test cases of phonologically conditioned variation from
. The failure of the CEDRA raises a serious unsolved challenge ...for learnability research in stochastic Optimality Theory, because the CEDRA itself was proposed to repair a learnability problem (
) encountered by the original Gradual Learning Algorithm. This result is supported by both simulation results and a detailed analysis whereby a few constraints and a few candidates at a time are recursively “peeled off” until we are left with a “core” small enough that the behavior of the learner is easy to interpret.
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